


All or Nothing At All

by BeautifulLife



Category: The Godfather (1972 1974 1990)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Arranged Marriage, Difficult Decisions, F/M, Italian Mafia, Marriage Proposal, Not a romance, not a self-insert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:01:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22032973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeautifulLife/pseuds/BeautifulLife
Summary: What if Kay Adams reacted differently to Michael's marriage proposal? Michael Corleone has to test other options--and gets uncomfortable results.
Relationships: Kay Adams Corleone/Michael Corleone, Michael Corleone/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 99





	All or Nothing At All

**Author's Note:**

> Follows movie canon, with some dialog in the Kay-Michael scene directly from the movie script, plus a small chunk from the novel. Diverges significantly from canon around the 800-word mark. If you're hoping for an AU where Michael gets his happily ever after with an audience insert, this is not that story, either. Title is from a Frank Sinatra song.

In the final six months before that long, black car tumbled Michael Corleone back into her life, Kay had convinced herself that her refusal to date was _not_ living like a widow.

She simply hadn’t found any man she wished to know better. Each Happy, Buffy, and Trip from her Dartmouth days seemed equally interchangeable with one another and with the earnest, laconic Seths, Noahs, and Thomases who turned up at her parents’ tea parties.

It was emphatically _not_ the case that losing her virginity to Michael Corleone left her feeling tied to him. Kay Adams wasn’t a superstitious Italian girl—no, she could have a bit of fun, all in good fellowship and kind spirits, and not tote around a broken heart afterward.

She hadn’t called his family compound in over a year.

But she couldn’t shake a conviction that Michael was unwillingly in the thrall of his father, like Tam Lin in the grip of the fairy queen. She’d found the story of Tam Lin in a dog-eared book of Scottish ballads, tucked in a trunk in the attic, when she’d retreated up there to cry in peace, that _first_ Christmas since Michael disappeared. The memory of being in New York with him had constricted her heart like an iron band, and only unbecoming tears gave relief.

The book took up residence on her nightstand—not under her pillow, that would have been ridiculously sentimental, not to mention uncomfortable. And as she read it over and over, in the empty small hours of the night, the conviction that if she forgot Michael Corleone, she would miss her chance to save her own Tam Lin, took up residence in her head.

And then, as she was walking her students to their bus on a brisk autumn afternoon, that long, black car delivered Michael Corleone to her.

Every urge in her body was to hurl herself onto him, like Janet pulling Tam Lin from that white horse—and the force of her upbringing kept her still.

“How long have you been back?” she heard herself say.

“I’ve been back about a year. Longer than that, I think.”

She waited for a smile to soften the blow—a _year_ , she was still including him in her prayers every night, a year ago—but Michael’s beautiful face now had the awkward angles of a badly mended pot. Perhaps smiling would break him.

“It’s good to see you, Kay.”

“It’s good to see you, too,” she said automatically. Her hands slid into her coat pockets.

“We could take have a drink.”

“No.” That came out too fast, too harsh. “If people saw me drinking here—”

“Coffee.”

“I hate coffee.”

“A walk, then. You can give me a quarter hour for a walk, Kay. For old time’s sake.”

She could give him her heart, her body, her soul—but she was not sure if she could endure putting one foot in front of another, down a street she had to walk every day and would now associate forever with _him._

“Of course I can, Michael.”

It was not cowardice to nudge their steps down the fork in the road that rolled out into the rustling reds and golds of the autumn countryside. It was practical. Neighbors asking questions—does Kay have a beau? who _is_ he? he looks wealthy, but there’s the reek of garlic there, if you know what I mean—would be fewer, away from the prim rows of houses behind their pots of ornamental cabbages. It would be quieter to talk—

But Michael, who’d always matched her palaver and philosophical flights, seemed to have nothing to say now. He walked beside her, at half an arm’s distance, as if his presence alone meant something.

Kay couldn’t guess at what.

“I’m working for my father now, Kay. He’s been sick—very sick.”

An iron band she hadn’t known was around her heart let go, so suddenly that she felt giddy. She would not have been surprised to hear a _ping_ from it ricocheting off the fender of the car so silently following them.

“But you’re not like him, Michael. I thought you said you weren’t going to become a man like your father. That’s what you told me—”

The cool assurance in his voice, as he explained to her that his father was like any powerful man, lit a spark of anger in her newly expanded heart.

“Senators and presidents don’t have men killed,” she said.

“Now who’s being naïve, Kay?”

_Where have you been, to come back this cynical?_

“Kay, my father's way of doing things is over—it's finished. Even he knows that. I mean in five years, the Corleone Family is going to be completely legitimate. Trust me. That's all I can tell you about my business.”

“What would I have to do to get you to leave it?”

“Leaving is not an option.”

“Why not? Come live up here. Teach math, like we talked about.” Some tiny shift in Michael’s expressionless wreck of a face makes her add: “I’m not asking you to marry me. We can go on as before… or not. I just want you to be someone better than your father.”

“It’s too late for that. My mother told you my brother Sonny was killed. Do you understand what that means?”

“It’s very sad, to lose a son and a brother so young.”

“He was my father’s heir. There are people depending on us. I have a duty to them.”

“A duty to be a criminal? What kind of duty is that?”

“It’s a business, Kay. A business like any other.”

“Not five minutes ago, you were promising it’d be legitimate in five years. Do you expect to hear a vice-president of, oh—” She rummaged in her head for the jobs held by Seths and Buffies. “Do you expect to hear a vice-president of ITT promise that?”

“ITT helped Germany during the war.”

She stopped and turned to face him, planting her sensible shoes so she wouldn’t be beguiled into wandering further. “Michael, why did you come here? What do you want from me after all this time?”

His misaligned features suddenly look fragile. “I came here because I need you. Because I care for you. Because I want you to marry me.”

Five years ago, she’d imagined that if Michael ever formally proposed to her, it’d be naked, between starched hotel sheets, in the afterglow of intimacy. That he’d be perched on the verge of the old sawmill road, like a crow, with that car _lurking_ as he waited for her answer with that infuriating serene confidence that she’d once found irresistible—

“Only if you leave the family business.”

“You’d be shielded from all that. You’d have a comfortable life. Children. Everything you could want. We’d have a life together.”

“Would you tell me what you do at the office?”

“No. I won’t be telling you what happened at the office every day. I won’t be telling you anything about my business. You’ll be my wife—”

“But not an equal partner,” she finished.

“Not an equal partner. That can’t be.”

Kay pulled her feet free of the earth and turned back the way they’d come. “You believe I’ll marry you to be… some kind of Italian madonna, stirring spaghetti sauce, raising children, and praying the rosary.”

“You can raise the children Protestant. I want our children to be influenced by you, not my father. I want them to grow up in the kind of world you live in, not mine.”

“While you’re at the office, arranging for gambling and prostitution and drugs and murder for hire.”

She can sense Michael’s rage by how he seems to draw inward, like a white-hot coal falling in on itself. “You have no idea what my family does.”

“That’s precisely my point.”

“What do you have against olive oil?”

That glimmer of the old, jokey Michael almost undid her. She had loved that Michael—she had cherished the memory of that Michael for five cold and broken years. She could _have_ that Michael, outside of business hours. Laugh with him, make love with him, bear and raise his children.

All she had to do was agree that he had two lives, one of which could never be hers. He wasn’t Tam Lin, waiting to be saved, but Cupid visiting Psyche in the darkness of night. As long as she never shown the light on him, he was _hers._

Kay stumbled, and instead of putting out an arm to steady her, Michael waited, distant and self-contained, as she regained her balance.

“No.” She could do this, or she could look him in the eye, but not both at once. “No. I can’t marry you.”

Any of the Trips or Noahs would have gone quietly at the refusal. Michael asked: “Why not? We always had good times. I _need_ you, Kay.”

“Because you won’t tell me about your business. You were always the one into logic, Michael. Think logically. Either you don’t trust me, in which case you shouldn’t marry me, or you know that if I knew the truth, I wouldn’t marry you.”

“Or I want you to be safe and happy—”

“With half a husband.” She made a try at flippancy to hide how much this _hurt,_ how much her heart seemed to be pushing all of _herself_ out of shape. “You’re good in bed, but not _that_ good.”

“Thank you for that insight.”

The old Michael would have laughed and proven her wrong.

“Either you shouldn’t marry me or I shouldn’t marry you. It comes out the same in the end. We shouldn’t get married.”

“Five years, Kay. All I’m asking is five years to transform the business—”

“You’re asking me to agree to a marriage that’s not based in trust. You’re asking me to bring children into that marriage, where their mother and father smile and keep secrets from each other. What kind of life is that for a child?”

“I’m not going to defend my decisions further.”

“Neither am I.”

“I need you, Kay. I need a wife.”

“But I don’t need a husband.”

***

Kay’s refusal left a hole in Michael Corleone’s plans, and also his pride. His heart, he had probed at and argued with—but like the square root of negative one, while he could find a _use_ for it, he could not prove it existed.

The ride back to the city left him with time to consider his options.

_Think logically, Michael._

There existed other mildly rebellious daughters of old American families, but the likelihood of his successfully wooing one as the son of his father was slim. He’d counted on Kay’s memories of him as the rebellious son to distract her from who he’d chosen to be.

 _And maybe to distract myself,_ a nagging voice in the back of his head commented. Seeing the old Michael, the noble Michael, the war hero who wasn’t like the Corleone family reflected in _her_ eyes would have given him back some fragments of the integrity that had been blown to bits with Apollonia.

He’d also counted on Kay for his entrance to the same “proper” American society that called his people _greaser_ and _guinea._ A form of social credit laundering, if you will.

So X out that path. He would not be marrying a Yankee.

There were showgirls, like Fredo dated. Following Fredo’s example in anything was obviously irresponsible. X out that path, too.

Hyman Roth, the kingpin down in Miami, had a daughter and might welcome a closer alliance. Sandra was pretty, the way money and comfort made a girl pretty—but between being divorced, Jewish, and rumored to sleep with every silver-tongued crooner in Vegas, there was no way the Church, the Corleone family, or Michael himself could accept her as his bride. X out that path.

Jewish mob daughters were, as a whole, out. The Church wouldn’t condone such a marriage, and the respectability and acceptance of Jews was no better than for Italians.

The same went for Irish girls. His children might be paler and lighter-haired, but—no.

This left him, logically, with an Italian girl. His father probably had one already picked out, and was biding his time, not challenging Michael’s preference to try Kay first.

Don Vito would not say _I told you so._ He’d gently and casually bring up this new girl over cigars and whiskey, just a first hint about someone Michael had played with as a child, and in a week or two, she’d somehow have an invitation to stay in the compound, comforting Sonny’s widow or maybe visiting Teresa Hagen.

The gears would go into motion—a drink here, a moonlight walk there, a dance at a family party, a proposal on the last night of her stay, a wedding at the new year.

***

And so Michael Corleone found himself walking around the compound in the snow at Thanksgiving, showing Gesualda Spadaro how the compound had changed since her last visit to his sister Connie, ten years ago.

With unlooked-for tact, Don Vito had seen to it that Michael’s bride-candidate had nothing more in common with Apollonia than being female.

Where Apollonia had been plump and glowing with life, Jess was fine-boned and inward-looking, with a downright quality that Michael attributed to her improbable job teaching English literature at City College.

“La professoressa,” Michael said experimentally, trying not to hiss like a snake. “How did that come about?”

“You weren’t the only rebel of your generation. I can’t get tenure, there’s no question of that, but it’s the work I wanted. Sometimes having a father who indulges all your whims is a healthy thing.”

“And you’re not married. My generation are fools.”

“Yes, mostly.” Jess brushed snow from a bench, laid her mittened hand on it, then clearly decided it was too cold to sit. “I’d rather have books, but I also want children, and something’s got to give.”

“You’re not opposed to marriage, then.”

“Michael. We both know why I’m here.”

Directness was usually a ruse—the appearance of candor distracting from the knife hidden in the real agenda. “Why is that?”

“Because you need a wife if you’re to be Don, and I need a husband if I’m to be a mother. Our fathers wouldn’t mind a closer affiliation. We don’t have to fall in love, but we need to be sure we can stand one another over bed and board for the next fifty years.”

“Only fifty?”

“I’m averaging the risk of your making it to eighty with the risk of your being assassinated before you’re forty.” She looked straight into his dark eyes, defying him to find this statement too bold.

In spite of himself, he was amused. “You’re realistic.”

“I try to be. Is there anywhere at all we can have this talk without the pretend romance of freezing our ankles off? I think better with a comfortable chair and a drink.”

Michael took her into Don Vito’s study, where he could settle her on a sofa with a glass of whiskey, and he could sit beside her without having to turn on the lamps or look at her. Sex was—could be—a bodily reflex. Jess was not repellent to him. She simply did not heat his blood with a glance. He could sit beside her and breathe as peacefully as his condition allowed.

“I won’t be telling you what happens at the office every day,” he said.

“Just because I spend my time with my head in a book, that doesn’t mean I don’t know how a family works. You can learn a lot by listening when people forget you’re there.”

“As my wife—”

“As your wife, I expect to be your _consigliere_. Not immediately, but as soon as I’ve had time to learn who’s who and get comfortable with your plans.”

The sheer ridiculousness of this demand caught Michael’s breath, sending whiskey to painfully rattle around his over-stressed sinuses. Jess pounded his back until his coughing fit subsided.

“Nobody will trust a woman as a _consigliere_. They’ll call my _pussy-whipped_. The wives will exclude you—”

“That’s never going to change if someone doesn’t change it.”

“You haven’t made your bones.”

Even in the dim light, Michael could see the scorn in Jess’s glance. “Please. I made my bones when I was sixteen.”

He got up to pace. Movement showed weakness, but sitting still made him feel like a sitting duck. “The mother of my children would be a murderer.”

“The father of my children would be a murderer.”

“That’s different.” If it were not different, women would be targets, always, like Apollonia had become by accident.

“How? The murdering gene isn’t on the Y chromosome? But it clearly is, you pass it on from father to son.”

“It’s not fitting. Women are intended to be the heart of the home. You’re gentler, more compassionate. It’s our responsibility to protect you. I want my children raised to be doctors or lawyers or professors, not routed into this bloody business. I want a home life that’s peace and tranquility—”

“Then tell the Don that you want a compliant woman, and marry her. I’ll marry a nice baker who’ll be amused by how I read while kneading the dough. We’ll all live happily ever after.”

Michael came to sit next to her, sloshing his whiskey so it circled gently in its glass. “Pop thought I should have an equal. Someone who’d been to college. Someone who’d worked in the mainstream American world. Someone who could be a true partner.”

“He knew my conditions, too.”

“A true partner, though, means being able to order someone killed without turning a hair.”

“Or getting out of the business. You said something over dinner—”

“Five years to be legitimate, yes, yes. But it’ll take shed blood to get there. Being willing to kill is not a quality I seek in a wife.”

Jess took a long slow sip of her drink. “You don’t like yourself very much.”

“Do you? Feel good about being a killer?”

“I’m realistic. I wouldn’t have killed just anyone, but the people I killed helped society most by leaving it.”

 _People._ Michael’s habit of stillness stopped him from betraying how much the idea of a wife who’d killed multiple people disturbed him, but he could no longer imagine himself so much as kissing Jess Spadaro.

“I don’t think you want an equal partner,” Jess went on, meditatively. “The point of a wife, for you, is to be a projection of what you miss in yourself. Purity. Kindness. Gentleness. Being someone who creates life rather than destroys it.”

If Jess was sincere, she’d be dangerous to marry—no man could master such a woman. If she was bluffing—more so. Jess Spadaro was herself the ticking bomb, capable of destroying his home if he made one wrong move.

“Capisco,” Michael said.

***

On the Saturday after Easter, Michael Corleone married another of Connie’s old friends, Giuseppina Russo—a widow with two fine sons, a stylish figure, and a head with space for nothing beyond family, food, fashion, and celebrity gossip.

A year later, when he had a fine son of his own, the mail brought an invitation to the marriage of Gesualda Spadaro and Henry Murray. A few questions asked by his men determined that Murray was a fellow professor, twice Jess’s age. Michael considered having Professor Murray told that his wife was a cold-blooded murderer, then gave instructions to send a silver gravy boat.

Three years after that, someone sent Michael a clipping of a newspaper article that mentioned a Kay Adams Jefferson being arrested in one of those protests down South. “Do you think she finally succeeded in shocking her parents?” he asked Tom Hagen, before he wadded up the scrap and tossed it in the trash.


End file.
